Damon Runyon
Times Record-News/November 2, 1928
And Old Nassau May Lose, But It Won’t Count, Because Beating Yale is Really All That Matters
NEW YORK, Nov. 1—The Chuckball—I mean football—attention of the East turns this week to Columbus, Ohio, which is west, if you live on our side of the Hudson River, but which is very much east if you are a resident of Pueblo, Colo.
For east is east and west is west, according to the direction from which you are glaring.
In any event the lads from Princeton, or old Nassau, are going to Columbus to play the boys of Ohio state about four periods of chuck— football.
A squadron of some of the expertest of the eastern experts will follow the Princetonians to Columbus. The game to most important to the experts because it will give them the opportunity of once again clasping hands with Mr. Hugh Fullerton, the famous sportswriter, who is now an inmate of Columbus.
It is the popular theory hereabouts that Mr. Fullerton moved to Columbus for no other reason than to be present at this particular game. Mr. Fullerton is a Princetonian by marriage, so to speak. His son attended Princeton. During that period Mr. Fullerton lived in the town of Princeton. Thus Mr Fullerton may be said to be thoroughly inoculated with the Princeton virus.
Mr. Fullerton No Spy
I doubt the truth of the rumor that Mr. Fullerton took up his residence in Columbus to spy upon the football system at Ohio State for Princeton. To begin with, Mr. Fullerton isn’t that kind of a sardine, and in the second place Princeton wouldn’t know what to do about tha Ohio State system even if it knew all about it.
For so far, Princeton’s football team hasn’t displayed to any amazing extent those qualities which make for a good old fashioned snake dance by the Hon. Large Will Edwards, the demon snake dancer of old Nassau.
It has won its games, or at least it hasn’t lost ’em, but not in a manner or by scores that would inspire Mr. Large Will Edwards’ prehensile limbs to serpentine gyration. It takes quite some impressive football playing to make Mr. Large Will Edwards get hot, as we say.
It wouldn’t be a horrendous surprise or shock to the effete East if Ohio State walloped Princeton. And It wouldn’t prove anything at the moment except that Mr. Bill Roper’s lads aren’t quite up to the Roperion standard this season.
They Still Believe It
While returning from the Cagling at New Haven Saturday, I became involved in conversation with a gentleman of Yale, and from this gentleman’s remarks I gleaned the information that the old time idea of football games and results still prevails at Yale, to wit:
“That no game really means anything to Yale except the Princeton game and the Harvard game. Princeton and Harvard remain Yale’s real rivals. Yale plays the Army and gets well Cagled, but what of it? Princeton and Harvard lie ahead. What about them? That’s the real football problem at Yale, the gentleman of Yale expressed it.
I presume Princeton feels the same way about Yale, which is now Princeton’s only real rival since Princeton fell out of Harvard’s social register. Princeton plays other games and wins or loses as the case may be, but the satisfaction is in beating Yale.
Harvard has two traditional rivals in Dartmouth and Yale. Harvard never seemed to regard Princeton as a traditional rival. It played Princeton, to be sure, but somehow the lads up at Cambridge didn’t view the result of the Prlnceton-Harvard game as seriously as they did the result of a Harvard-Yale pastime.
Traditions Presented
Of late years I thought Yale seemed to be drifting from the old fixed idea of pointing mainly for Harvard and Princeton. I thought it found equal satisfaction winning from other colleges and equal depression in losing.
But evidently not. The Cagles are but fillers-in. Yale would like to beat them, of course, just as John J. McGraw loves to have his Giants beat those outfits he plays on the way north from a training camp. Yet it isn’t tremendously important. It is merely by way of upholding big league prestige.
And I presume that the Yale attitude is as it should be. The traditional rivals are the boys to load up for, if only for the preservation of traditions.
I am inclined to think that Yale will beat both Princeton and Harvard this year. The latter has a good stout team, as it demonstrated in beating Dartmouth. It will be better when it gets to the Yale game. A Harvard team is always better when it gets to the Yale game. That’s part of the tradition.
The Archive 